New Home Sales Hit All-Time Lows: 4 Things You Should Know

Although exiting home sales bounced back recently–thanks to plummeting prices–a government report issued Thursday showed that December sales of new homes plummeted nearly 15 percent from the previous month to all-time lows. (That’s 45 percent below year-earlier levels.) “This is horrible,” Ian Shepherdson, chief US economist for High Frequency Economics, said in a report.

Here are four things you should know about the latest new home sales report:

1. How bad was December? Well, according to Mike Larson of Weiss Research, it was the single worst month on record. “We have NEVER sold this few homes in any month since the Census Bureau started tracking in 1963,” Larson said in a report. “Not even in the early 1980s, when mortgage rates were in the 18 [percent] range.”